Cultivation Starts With the Body

All spiritual cultivation starts with the body.

It's very important to find your center in the body.

But then, when you are seeking to unite to the rest of the universe, you can't achieve that if you are looking at your own being as the 'center' of the universe.

The universe is vast and if you try to push your own being into the center place of it, you won't be able to Unite; you will still be trying to have your own separate being at the middle, you're essentially trying to demand that the Universe unite with you (or "around" you).

When connecting to the Universe, you have to realize that you are United to it as an inseparable part of it, but not the center around which all other things orbit.

It is like the pictures in Chinese art. You see this style where there are great landscapes, symbolic of Nature and the Universe, and then somewhere in some little edge or corner, there is a person.

(note the tiny human figures, crossing the bridge, over the waters between the mountains)





When you try to put yourself at the center of the Universe, this naturally alienates you from reality, and from the physical, and from association with your body. Conversely, when you return your meditation to the body, you go within, and step out of the illusion of your own centrality. Paradoxically, only by doing so can you experience the vastness of the universal in a truthful way.

You do not need to be in the middle of this vastness; in fact, you can't be. You can't achieve that and create the appropriate place for the universe.

To Unite, you need to see your place in the enormous vastness of space/time that came before you and comes after you, that is beyond you and behind you.
That is to say, of your notion of you.

When you can be comfortable and fulfilled with just being a part of the big picture, even as a small figure on one edge of the canvas, then you can achieve Union.